Gas appliances, and in particular cooktops having modular, plug-in cooking units are known and commercially available. Typically, these cooktops have two or more compartments into which modular cooking cartridges are inserted. For example, one cooktop may include a surface burner cartridge disposed in one compartment and a grilling cartridge disposed in another compartment.
For ease of manufacturing, connections for the operation of the modular cooking cartridges are permanently installed in the gas appliance. The connections are disposed in the gas appliances so as to facilitate easy connection to a modular cooking unit and typically include identical gas outlets for each compartment for providing gas to the modular cooking cartridges. Thus, the manufacturer can manufacture standardized modular cooking cartridges and can more economically provide a wider variety of gas appliances as demanded by consumers.
Typically, the connections in the gas appliance include a gas orifice that is standardized to provide a gas flow rate suitable for surface burner units. Some modular cooking cartridges, such as grilling cartridges, however, require a lower gas flow rate than surface burner cartridges, and will not function properly at the higher gas flow rates. Thus, gas flow rate incompatibility presents a problem when installing, for example, a grilling cartridge into a standardized modular cooktop.
In conventional modular cooktops, this incompatibility problem is solved by removing the standard orifice and changing it to an orifice that matches the gas flow rate requirement of the cooking cartridge to be installed. This is inconvenient and undesirably wasteful in terms of labor and material.